BEFORE: I'm going to squeeze one more film in before New York Comic-Con really gets rolling, because I've got an eye on the calendar and how many days there are until our vacation, and I know how many films I want to cross off the list before that. We'll be in Nashville on the weekend before Halloween, so we may do something holiday-related like go on a spooky pub crawl. Also, I've got to remember to buy all my candy next week, because if I wait until after the vacation, it will be way too late to get the best treats.
Nosferatu aside, the last time I saw the Dracula character, he was mixed up with some crazy business with Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man - it was the tail end of the Universal horror mash-up craze, where they threw all their monsters together ("Monster Mash-Up", get it?) in the futile hope of making something that was greater than the sum of its parts. But over the course of 13 or 14 years, the convoluted history of what happened when Dracula met the other monsters, who played whom in which film, and so on pretty much imploded in on itself. I know I sure couldn't keep track of whose brain was inside the Monster's head on any given day, or which hunchbacked lab assistant was working for which mad scientist.
As I've stated before this year, my new policy is to allow films to link together based on shared characters, if actor linking is not available. So for my purposes, I'm considering Nosferatu/Count Orlov to be essentially the same character as Count Dracula, since the Germans ripped off Bram Stoker's book to make that film. But Hollywood based the more famous 1931 Bela Lugosi film on the 1924 stage play of "Dracula", not directly on the novel. So there are bound to be some differences. Oddly, although I've seen some of the later Universal sequels with Dracula in them, I've never seen the original - I rectify that tonight, though it seems like a bit of a fait accompli at this point.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "House of Frankenstein" (Movie #2,473)
THE PLOT: The ancient vampire Count Dracula arrives in England and begins to prey upon the virtuous young Mina.
AFTER: Yeah, they definitely shuffled the deck here in terms of the characters and their roles - the Bram Stoker novel has Jonathan Harker traveling to Transylvania to do business with Count Dracula, and even "Nosferatu" sent the Harker stand-in, Hutter, to do the same. But this film (again, based on the stage play) sends Mr. Renfield out to meet the Count in his castle, and that's another way to get Renfield to become Dracula's servant and fixer, which does happen in the novel but much later in the story. And both this film and "Nosferatu" then arrange for Dracula and his coffins to travel by boat from Romania to a new land, only it's Germany in "Nosferatu" and the U.K. here (and in the novel).
You see, it gets confusing really fast - all of the classic Dracula stories have the same elements, but they each throw them together in their own way. I don't think any of the films had much interest in being faithful to the novel until that one in 1992 that Coppola directed - and even then, I'm not sure that one completely followed the same story track either.
But my point is that Renfield is given a much larger part here - whereas he didn't even make it to "Nosferatu" at all, Count Orlok acted pretty independently, except for a coachman. And Renfield seems like the character who's the most fun, at least the actor seemed like he had a real ball playing a crazy man who eats bugs and spiders and warns all of the other humans that there is a vampire in their midst, while at the same time he's working for Dracula and trying not to get into trouble with his master. If you notice, we never see Dracula bite Renfield, instead he only gets hypnotized into serving the Count, because a studio executive thought that Dracula should only bite women. Hollywood, apparently, felt the audience was not ready for a vampire that bites both ways.
Lugosi, on the other hand, didn't seem like he was doing any heavy lifting, from an actor's perspective anyway, all he had to do was act charming in some scenes and then stare into the camera in others, with his supposed hypnotic glare. So many acting choices to make, and yet the default position seemed to be a blank stare, it's an odd decision on the part of the director. But we're talking about something that was done very, very early in the history of horror films, in the history of cinema even, and at the time there just wasn't a road map on how to make a horror film, so every decision was a ground-breaking one, in a way.
We all know the rules about vampires now, of course, thanks to movies, like how they hypnotize women to drink their blood, they can't be seen in mirrors, or how they can turn into bats and wolves (though that wolf-thing has been downplayed over the years, I think, to avoid confusion with werewolves). You have to remember that this was mostly new to audiences in 1931, so this film really hammers home that mirror thing - we see Van Helsing looking at the mirror about four or five times, comparing the mirror image to what he sees in the room, just to insure the audience really GETS IT. And the flying bat that is allegedly Dracula is so fake that it's not even funny - it just looks like a plastic toy on a fishing line that some poor gaffer had to dangle at the top of the frame while standing on a ladder.
Similarly, every time that Dracula bites someone in the neck, it happens behind a tree, or just out of frame, or even completely off-screen. We never even get to see him turn into a wolf, or even see Lugosi with FANGS, for cripes sake. What's a vampire without fangs, or I should say with just implied fangs and not visible ones? Pretty darn toothless, it turns out. This is really the charming, suave, sophisticated Dracula, the one who dressed really well (compared to Nosferatu's rather shabby clothing) and while it really set the standard for future movie vampires for a good long time, there's really not much horror in this horror film, not by today's standards, anyway. My score below is really given more out of respect than anything else.
The decision to base this film on the stage play rather than the novel was apparently one made for financial considerations - fewer locations in a stage play, plus they probably re-used the Transylvanian castle set to double as the British abbey set. Bear in mind this was made during the Great Depression, so there you go.
NITPICK POINT: To introduce Dracula as a vampire who has an appetite for blood, Renfield is shown to have cut himself - not with a knife, but with a paper clip, while doing paperwork. How is that even possible? Were paper clips different in 1930, like were they super-sharp or something? As far as I know, they've always been the familiar rounded metal "trombone" shape - and it's essentially impossible to draw blood with a paper clip under normal usage, or even accidentally. Wouldn't a letter opener or a sharp pair of scissors been more believable?
Starring Bela Lugosi (last seen in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man"), Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye (also last seen in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man"), Edward Van Sloan, Herbert Bunston, Frances Dade, Joan Standing, Charles K. Gerrard.
RATING: 4 out of 10 sprigs of wolfsbane
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